Most restaurants providing beverages for take-out service employ wax or paper cups. These cups are usually too thin to provide reasonable thermal insulation for the customer from a hot beverage such as coffee. In order to hold a typical cup the customer has to either wrap his hand around the cup and risk being burned or hold the cup at the tip of his fingers to avoid being burned on the hand, but risk dropping the cup and spilling the coffee.
Most take-out customers want to drink their coffee in a car. This can be quite dangerous where the cup is to be held continuously while driving. This is especially so where the beverage is hot and may distract the driver when spilled.
Solutions to the problem of insulating the drinker from the coffee have included finger holes folding out from the side of the cup to form a handle. These types of cups are fairly flimsy and although they provide better insulation than the cup alone they still run the risk of being easily dropped. Additionally, due to the added manufacturing costs restaurants are reluctant to use these types of cups. A customer does not know when he pulls into the restaurant whether he will receive such a cup.
The handled cup does not solve the problem of having to hold the cup while driving.
Recently coffee drinkers have taken to using a two piece coffee cup. Coffee is poured into a cup portion, while a removable base portion is secured to the dash board of a car or other horizontal surface. The cup portion is filled either directly in the restaurant or later by pouring the coffee from the cup provided by the restaurant into the cup portion. Examples of these are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 899,811 issued to D. A. Stewart on Sept. 29, 1908; 4,040,549 issued to C. J. Sadler on Aug. 9, 1977; 4,127,211 issued to issued to J. E. Zerbey on Nov. 28, 1978; and 4,643,381 issued to L. M. Levy on Feb. 17, 1987.
These types of cups are reusable and should be washed after every use. This is not as easy as it sounds when the customer is on the road. By the time he arrives at a place where he can wash the cup the remaining coffee ha usually dried to the bottom of the cup. Also it is extremely easy to forget to take the cup out of the car. When the driver next wants to use the cup is the time he usually remembers he should have washed it after the last use.
An example of a base holder for disposable paper type cups is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 2,910,219 issued to Bennett on Oct. 27, 1959. This holder allows the drinker to use the disposable cup from a restaurant with a re-usable clip-on base. However, the Bennett device does not extend above the base and can become unclipped fairly easily. Additionally, no provision is made to insulate the drinker from a hot beverage which may be in the cup. Furthermore this type of holder does not provide support to the cup which may be relatively fragile. Just a simple clip-on base is provided; there is no teaching or suggestion that this could be retained in a holder permanently mounted on, for example, a car dashboard.
It is an object of the present invention in some of its various aspects to alleviate one or more of these various problems.